An extremist, not a fanatic

January 23, 2011

Microfoundations of domino theory

It looks as if the Tunisian revolution might be spreading. Which raises the question: what are the micro foundations of such a domino effect?That there are such effects is clear. They explain why the English ruling class was terrified by the French revolution; why the US was so desperate to resist Vietnamese communism; and why Georgia’s rose revolution inspired uprisings in the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. But what exactly is the mechanism here?This paper (pdf) sheds some light. Consider someone pondering whether to protest. The gain from doing so is the probability of achieving your objective. The cost is the risk of being arrested or beaten up. How you weigh up these costs and benefits depends upon your belief about the strength of the government. If you think it’s strong enough to resist the protests, you might not bother. But if you think it’s weak enough to either give in or not punish protestors, you will protest. And here’s the thing. The reaction of neighbouring governments to similar protests affects your judgment of your own government’s strength or weakness. If it is weak, you figure: “Maybe protests will work here as well.” At the margin, this gets more people onto the streets. One government’s reaction to protests has “reputation externalities” for other governments. As it stands, there are a couple of holes here. One is the problem of collective action. To the individual, the potential costs of protesting are high - possibly death - whilst the benefits are spread over millions. So why doesn’t he just free-ride on others’ protests? If everyone does this, there’ll be no protests.The very fact that there are protests shows that there’s something wrong with this. The answer, I suspect, is that some people - “extremists”! - gain symbolic utility from protesting. If they are not beaten up and arrested, other, less fanatical, people join them. This is why the size of protests sometimes snowballs. (A further mechanism here is Timur Kuran's theory of availability cascades: seeing others protest makes us think that protesting is a reasonable thing to do).The second hole is: what exactly is going on the mind of the marginal protestor who sees a successful revolution in a neighbouring country? The paper seems to suggest that he has been always conducting a rational cost-benefit analysis of whether to protest or not. But I suspect what might instead be happening is a form of attention effect. The thought of protesting simply doesn’t occur to him, until he sees others - people like him doing so. And when he sees this, he figures: “I can do that.”I draw two conclusions here. First, domino theory is very similar to peer effect and role model theories. Similar mechanisms are at work.Secondly, state power operates in two different ways. On the one hand, its use or threat of force (or not) affects people’s incentives to protest. But on the other hand, power operates by keeping some thoughts out of people’s heads; one reason why folk don’t protest more is that the idea of doing so doesn’t occur to them. And this raises the question: what other thoughts that might threaten those in power never occur to us?

The thought of protesting simply doesn’t occur to him, until he sees others - people like him doing so. And when he sees this, he figures: “I can do that.”

Take that marginal calculation, and add the smart phone which tells the agent much more about what other people are protesting at the moment, where and when. Now the protester can choose much more precisely how much to participate, be at the edge of the crowd, in the middle, or in a hotel room. Protesters gain a ten fold increase in risk mitigation.

There seems much too simplistic an assumption of what goes on in people's minds when they protest here. When I join protests in London, I know it is likely to be ignored by government and that there is a strong chance of getting horse-charged, detained, kettled, hit, crushed etc.... I go despite these facts because I feel it is the right thing to do. I'm sure I'm not the only person that has the same motivation - I was listening to interviews with the Tunisian protesters and a similar sentiment was echoed - the feeling that one had to join the protest because it was everybody's responsibility - precisely because if everyone "free-rides" there can be no resistance.
I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of a sense of "solidarity" in people's decisions; plenty of people have gone through great hardship or even died for obviously lost causes. No purely rational cost/benefit weigher could ever have taken part in resistance against the Nazis, the many peasant revolts of Medieval Europe or even the Paris Commune - nobody involved in these movements could have failed to notice that their efforts were almost certainly doomed, and indeed most came to unpleasant ends.
I think masses of people can very quickly become radicalised and are willing to take great risks when there is a sense of collective resistance to an injustice that threatens them all - there is a kind of "now or never" sense of being compelled to take part.

May try and link this stuff into that and get things moving again, a lot of the more complicated, political philosophy is beyond me but I'll give it a go! There has been a lot of activity and rumour recently regarding a takeover of United, which can only inspire more people join the anti-Glazer cause.

I'd have thought that there's a beauty contest/Schelling effect of some kind: if enough other people are going to protest, it's rational for me to do so. This effect can be explained by different aspects of discounted utility: personal safety; the chances of successfully achieving the goal; and the admiration (contingent on both of the above) from telling your grandchildren, or the person you're chatting up in a bar, that you were there.

In order to gauge how many other people will show up on the streets, you need to guess what they might be thinking - and what they might think you might be thinking. And a successful revolution in the next-door country is a strong influence on that. It simply acts as a focal point to implicitly coordinate, without direct communication, the intentions and actions of many people.

Events in Vietnam do not concide with the gist of yr article. It was a war against communism. Communism that wud not have only bashed in yr head or horse charged u,but wud have had u gone from this planet.

For us in south east asia ,it was a regional fight against the puppet masters China/Russia. In my country ,Thank God ,we won and we have a free life.